Analyst Hero of the Month: Paul Bugryniec @ Miniclip

August 11, 2014 started like any other day for Paul Bugryniec. He started his commute to London’s burgeoning tech and games scene, where gaming company Miniclip is based. At that time, Bugryniec was one of three analysts at Miniclip, building forecast models and providing analysis for various business teams. But Miniclip’s executive team had bigger plans for its data strategy.

With over 45 games published and 200 million monthly active users, Miniclip was sitting on top of a gold mine of product and user data that they wanted to harness in order to better understand their users and improve the gaming experience. The executive team knew the only way to build and grow its data strategy was to centralize its analysts and appoint a Head of Business Intelligence to lead a team of data scientists, analysts, and engineers. The man for the job was Bugryniec.

During the data team’s founding year, Bugryniec focused on two priorities: 1) build a centralized data warehouse in Redshift, and 2) find a way for the rest of the organization to visualize that data.

“We had limited engineering resources, so I knew I wanted a cloud-based analytics platform that did not require a lot of engineering work to implement,” Bugryniec said. “But more importantly, the tool needed to be easy to use, so our non-technical business users can self-serve and pull the analysis they want.”

Bugryniec narrowed in on two finalists: BIME and Chartio. “BIME edged out Chartio because of its vast ecosystem of connectors and user-friendly interface,” Bugryniec said. “Today, BIME has become the central point of the entire company’s data and reporting.”

For every department—product, user acquisition, website, Bugryniec and his team will sit down with stakeholders to understand the data and metrics they want to track and how they want to consume it. One of the first areas Bugryniec and his team worked to streamline was the heart of Miniclip’s business—game analytics. By keeping a pulse on the performance of their games, the product team can better assess the economy of each game. In BIME, the data team created custom KPIs that were core to their business, like revenue per user, daily active user, average tenure, and customer LTV by cohort.

“My team’s goal is get every team to self-serve on the data they need,” Bugryniec said. “The product team logs into BIME to monitor their KPI dashboards everyday. We set up email reports to be sent to the executives every month so they can consume it directly in their inbox.”

Others teams use BIME in a similar fashion to consume the metrics they care about. The advertising team goes into BIME to see how their mobile ad campaigns are performing. The user acquisition team reviews their entire funnel. The web team uses BIME instead of Google Analytics. The community team looks at social reporting from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube in one place.

But this is just the beginning for Bugryniec and his team.

“We are now collecting data and measuring the numbers we want, but it’s not enough,” Bugryniec said. “This year, we’re going to get more granular to understand our business drivers even more and start being more proactive in how we handle churn. Can we get ahead of customers and better anticipate and predict their needs?”